The box was 10 days late, but I should point out that this marks the first time an HP promise was actually fulfilled. They told me on the 20th that I’d receive the box within 2 to 3 days and it showed up on the 3rd day.

This explains the problems I’ve been having with my notebook failing to boot after sleep or hibernation, and the blue video signal being sent to my external LCD monitor. The startup problem required multiple power cycles in order to get the damned thing to boot up.

So it’s good that HP is owning the problem. The problem, however, is that I need to figure out how to get along for 10 days without my laptop, which is the primary computer for all my consulting work. I have an old Dell laptop that I use for testing web pages on older browsers, but I don’t think it will handle much of what I need to do. It has only an eighth of the RAM my current laptop has, and a quarter of the disk. Maybe I can swap the disks, but I can’t do anything with the RAM (except to buy more for a notebook I pretty much never use).

So this seems like a good test for me as I consider starting my own computer fixing business here in the North Fork Valley. I guess I should be able to fix my own problems before I start expecting others to pay me to fix theirs, huh?

UPDATE 10/12: Before I had a chance to do much with my hard disk, the laptop just stopped working. Can’t reboot. So now I REALLY have to find a way to get at the files on the hard disk before I ship it to HP.